Gallery MORYTA + Gallery Kazuki

In 1990, as a trading company employee, I encountered Gallery Kazuki and was awakened to the depths of art. The following year, I quit my job and opened Gallery Kazuki (now Gallery MORYTA) on Keyaki-Street in Akasaka.” The gallery, a kind of “hideout,” became an art salon packed with creative people, not to mention painters.However, there was a gap in direction between me and Hitomi Katsuki, who is an expressionist who has gone beyond art and into music, poetry, and the performing arts. In 2015, my late friend Kazuhiro Nishimuta and I approached Kazuki to organize Kyushu’s first art fair in Fukuoka, the beginning of MORYTA+Kazuki, the founders of ART FAIR ASIA FUKUOKA 《AFAF》. For this AFAF, we jointly assembled three spaces as an experimental space. Global warming, invasion of Ukraine, collapse of democracy,ethnic conflict, disparity, etc., asking what art can deliver to people in this era…. Shunichiro Morita